The Kilkenny Observer Newspaper is delighted to present our ‘2024 Christmas short story series’. We invited five Kilkenny based writers to submit a short story each week over the last four weeks, which we hope you enjoyed.
This is week five, and our final week. We welcome John Mac Kenna.
The Observer wishes to thank: Joseph Kearney, Catherine Cronin, Patrick Griffin, Keela Ayres and John Mac Kenna.
By John MacKenna
Writers are thieves. We steal stories, ideas, phrases, characters, whatever we can lay our hands on and we do it at the drop of a hat. And we steal all the time – even at Christmas.
So, what I’m about to tell you is really the story of five men – the thief; his two friends; the man who lived on the roadside and the man in the London flat.
It was across a Christmas table that I first heard the story of the old man who lived on the roadside and it came from my neighbour, Paul Donohue. He mentioned that the old man had lived in a caravan on the outskirts of a nearby town. The caravan had been the old man’s home for a long, long time. So long that he had cut back the ditch around it, dug and sown a vegetable patch, cleared and planted flowerbeds and made a lawn. The caravan and its garden were as well kept as any of the manicured gardens in the nearby estates. The man, who lived on the roadside left people alone, went his own way and lived his patient, quiet life and, for the most part, people left him in peace.
On a particularly bright and calm Christmas morning a neighbour was making his way to Mass and, as he approached the caravan, he heard a low, whirring sound. Drawing closer he saw the old man steadily walking up and down, pushing an outdated manual lawnmower, cutting the small patch of grass that bordered the vegetable garden. The men exchanged greetings and talked about the mildness of the day.
“It’s unusual to see someone out cutting the grass on a Christmas morning,” the neighbour said.
The old man looked him in the eye.
“Is it Christmas Day?” he asked. “I didn’t know it was Christmas Day.”
The second story was told to me by my friend Tom Hunt. And, again, it was told across a kitchen table at Christmas time. It was the story of Tom’s father and uncle, who had worked on their father’s farm. On his death, the farm was left to Tom’s father, the eldest son. He assured his brother that he was welcome to stay on the land, that they could work side by side. But the younger man wouldn’t hear of it and took the boat to England. Like so many before him, he found employment on building sites. And each Christmas Tom’s mother would send a card to her brother-in-law, wishing him peace and the joys of the season.
“Thirty-eight years after he left home, the word came that he had died,” Tom told me. “I was sent over to London to make the funeral arrangements and to clear out his flat. It was a single bedsit with one narrow bed, one chair, one table, one of everything. And under the bed I found the old cardboard suitcase he’d brought with him when he left home as a young man. And inside it were the thirty-eight Christmas cards my mother had sent him over the years. Nothing else. Just the Christmas cards.”
I am a thief but sometimes a tale is too precious to steal.
I listened to the stories told to me by Paul and Tom – over the same Christmas table as it happens – and I knew I could never do anything with them beyond retelling the isolation of the lives of the old man on the roadside and the man in the tiny London bedsit.
Sometimes that’s all there is to do. Sometimes you sit back and let the shiver of sadness run down your spine, the recognition of the roads and boats you might have taken. Sometimes you breathe in the blessings that are yours, gratefully accepting the happier share.
So tonight I think of the thief and his two friends sitting at a well-laden table in a warm kitchen, the lights from the Christmas tree falling across their faces. And I think, too, of the old men in their isolation and the strange appropriateness of their stories at Christmas time. For, are we not celebrating the birth of a baby boy whose existence was one of wandering and of homelessness and whose life ended in the most abject and isolated of circumstances.
But, if we believe what we’re told, there was more to his story than that and my wish is that when Paul and myself sit across a Christmas table, in the glow of this year’s seasonal lights, we will raise a silent salute to the memory of the old man in the roadside caravan; the man in the small London flat and to our absent friend, Tom Hunt, and wish them a happy and peaceful Christmas together in the brighter lights of eternity.
John MacKenna is an author and playwright who lives in Co Carlow. He teaches Creative Writing at Maynooth University and at The Hedge School on the Moone.
